Influence of International Institution

THE INFLUENCE OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS: INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN, COMPLIANCE, EFFECTIVENESS, AND ENDOGENEITY Ronald B. Mitchell Department of Political Science University of Oregon Tel: 541-346-4880 rmitchel@ uoregon.edu

Paper prepared for a workshop to be held at Princeton University 17-19 February 2005 Draft of: 09 January 2005

Abstract: No scholar has done more than Robert Keohane to develop a scholarly agenda for research on international institutions. In the 1980s, he spearheaded the analytical examination of international regimes, explaining why governments might be interested in creating rules and adopting norms that constrained their policy choices. Having made a theoretically compelling case for the demand for international regimes, Keohane recognized as well as anyone that the next step was to show that international institutions have important consequences for policy choice and for international relations generally. This article examines the problem of identifying institutional influence given that problem structure influences both institutional design and the behaviors institutions are designed to influence. In particular, it focuses on issues of endogeneity and the difficulties of distinguishing structural determinants of behavior, institutional determinants of behavior, and structure-through-institutions determinants of behavior.

Introduction Robert Keohane has focused much of his academic career on international institutions, treating them both as dependent and independent variables. This article builds on a fundamental insight of Keohane's influential After Hegemony: that distinguishing the influence of international institutions from that of raw power and interests requires accounting for the important ways that power and interests influence the formation and design of those institutions. Accurately evaluating international institutions as independent variables requires first identifying their determinants, i.e., evaluating them as...